I just delivered a walnut coffee table that I'm am really pleased with. The design brief from my customer was the following: "I'm looking for a 4' to 5' diameter round coffee table; I like mid century modern designs; I like walnut." I made one design sketch and he said, "I love it. Build it."

You can do a lot worse than Mid Century Modern design for inspiration. I wanted the tabletop to be solid wood, not veneered, and I located the legs at the edges for stability. And then I lost my mind for a minute and incorporated a slightly complicated form of mortise and tenon joinery to attach the legs to the top. Which meant the legs would have to be hand cut, shaped, and carved from large blocks of solid wood instead of simply turned on a lathe.

Before and after of the table legs

Happily, the joinery all worked out nice and crisp.

Joinery detail

Leg joinery detail

I'm really pleased with this piece. So is my customer. So is Rachel, but she was hoping the customer might change their mind so we could keep this table.

A while back I acquired a rather special plank of Sugar Pine. It was 2" thick, 22" wide, and 11' long. It was also completely clear, meaning it didn't have a single knot. The end grain of the board shows 118 years of growth rings. Some rough calculating estimates the tree this board was cut from would have been at least 4 feet across, and been over 300 years old!

I barely even saw Sugar Pine when I was an apprentice; old timers would lament it's scarcity, telling stories about how beautiful it was, how lovely it was to work, and how much millwork used to be made from it. I've considered using this board a few times, but each time decided it deserved a better idea.

This past December a few things converged into inspiration: I needed a Christmas present for Rachel, she had previously shown me a photo of a chair that she liked, and I realized that I could make her a chair based loosely on the photo using 4 pieces of the plank.

So out came the saw.

Like most rough sawn boards, this one had a pronounced cup. A cup a curve that runs the length of a board, sort of like flexing the two long edges of a playing card toward each other. This happens as lumber is dried. Usually, this cup is planed away, yielding a board that is thinner, but flat with smooth faces. However, here I wanted to keep the rough sawn surfaces because they had such a beautiful patina and would look perfect with the fabric I planed to use for the upholstery. So I oriented the cup in the sides to give a welcoming flair to the char, and in the back and seat to cradle the sitter.

The seat and backrest are scribed and fitted into the sides. Everything is joined together with a line of wooden pegs.

My friend Barbara, who owns a local shop called Patriae made the cushions. She specializes in antique european textiles. We chose old hand woven hemp/linen grain sacks. The monogram is hand dyed to mark a particular farmer's grain sacks, and the patches were hand stitched on to extend the life of each sack.

Barbara's fabrics have such beautiful texture, feel, and color. It is always a wonderful surprise to take a closer look at utilitarian objects and find such beauty.

Inspiration is a fickle thing. I don't often experience it in a flash. I like Chuck Close's explanation: "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." At the end of this process sits a chair that I think is beautiful and is already filled with history, stories, and collaboration. That's inspiring enough for me. And yes, Rachel loves her chair!

Here is a rather unique bench. It's made from White Cedar beams. The legs are joined to the top with massive, hand cut dovetails. It is 46" long x 11" deep x 17" high, so it's the perfect height to pull up to your favorite dining or kitchen table. It would also serve well as a foyer bench. It might even receive a blessing and be put into service as an alter in a special place.

I'm delighted with how this bench turned out. The long radial cracks are infilled with resin blackened with ground charcoal from the wood stove in my shop. These deep, black fissures both contrast and highlight the beautiful grain of the cedar and the precise dovetail joinery. There is an inlay of cedar running around one of the legs. The feet are padded with cork to protect the floor. It has a waterborne finish with a hand polished low satin sheen.

This bench is available for purchase. The introductory price is $2500. Delivery within 75 miles of Asbury Park, NJ is included. If you are interested in this piece or have any questions, please drop me a line or call me at 732-996-9740.

So that's the basics. If you have a moment, allow me to tell you the story of this bench...

The bench on the workbench

Like most woodworkers, I've always got at least a small collection of interesting pieces of wood waiting for the right idea to come along. In the late 90's, a cabinetmaker that I'm friends with built a pergola from beautiful white cedar 6x6 beams. He gave me a few 4' long offcuts with the caveat that I make something cool with them. They were milled as structural posts, so they have boxed hearts, meaning they are cut from the very center of the tree. You see full, concentric circles, not just arcs when looking at the end grain. Also, beams cut this way tend to develop pretty amazing cracks that radiate from the center of the tree and run along the grain as the wood dries out. I promised to make something good and tucked them into my stash.

When the lumber is bigger than the powertools...

Several times I thought of using them for bedposts or table legs. But the ideas were never quite right, and remained in my sketchbook. However, the other day I was looking through my lumber stash for ideas, and I started thinking about cutting some giant dovetails on those big cedar timbers. The idea of a bench quickly followed, and I decided that it was finally time to make something with these old beams.

Fitting dovetails

Dovetails are a pinnacle of craftsmanship in woodworking, and as such I believe they should represent one's finest effort. When I was teaching myself to make them I decided that I would only cut them by hand. Practically speaking, this means that rather than setting up a jig and router or a dedicated dovetailing machine, I lay out my dovetail joinery with a very sharp pencil and marking knife and then cut and chop the shape of each joint with handsaws and chisels. Each cut must be made exactly right, and the surfaces of each pin and tail must then be fitted with the precision of a machinist. When things go well, you work in a zen-like state of focus; when things go poorly it's like making the most frustrating, costly firewood in the world. It's a stressful, tedious and painstaking process, but one of the most rewarding jobs a woodworker can do.

The bench, disassembled. Pins on the left; tails on the right

Usually, dovetails are used to join drawers and boxes, so they tend to be small. About the size of your little finger, sometimes even smaller if something is to be finely detailed. But the joint can be scaled up to be used on large timbers as well.

The tails... 16oz coffee cup for scale

These are the largest dovetails I have ever attempted. Making dovetails of any size is rewarding, and I'm pleased to say that dovetails that are almost 6" long are pretty amazing!

This post is a bit of a departure. It's not about my work for a change. This is about a friend of mine named Kate Wilt and her work.

Kate is a weaver.

Just before the holidays Rachel and I hosted one of Kate's weaving workshops at the cafe. Kate showed us a merino wool scarf that she had made. It was beautiful, and it stopped us in our tracks.

In a rare moment of holiday brilliance, I quickly contacted Kate and commissioned her to weave a scarf for Rachel. We decided that it would be made from linen, which is Rachel's favorite fabric. (Also because linen is magic. Put some linen sheets on your bed and you'll understand.)

I stopped by to see Kate weaving the scarf. I've written here before about my love of process. Watching her weave and listening to her description of the process spun my brain around. It is fascinating: convoluted and orderly and organic and mathematical and zen.

We've gone through a few dining tables at home recently. I'd made a trestle table that we loved out of some reclaimed heart pine leftover from an old project. Then we decided to put that table into our cafe. I made a replacement that stayed with us for a few months before I sold it (along with it's chairs and bench) to a local builder for his conference room. This is our latest. It's made from old joists that came out of a local building from the late 1800's. The design is inspired by old cast iron factory benches and machinery bases. I planed and polished the tops, but left the old rough patinated surface on the edges. The bases are painted with flat black milk paint. Stretchers are steel pipe. I'm not supposed to sell this one, but I don't see a big difference between making a new one for you or for us. ;)

My clients recently built a beautifully detailed Arts and Crafts house and asked me to make them some furniture that felt right within the period, but wasn't totally constrained by it. The table and benches are pretty straight forward and show the classic Stickley influence, but the armchairs push tradition a bit (in a good way, I think).

This old walnut slab came to me unexpectedly a handful of years back. A guy stopped by my shop one day and asked if I wanted to buy a walnut slab that he'd had in his family barn for a few decades. I told him to bring it by and I'd take a look at it. He was back a week later with a 5' long log that had been sawed into four 2 1/2" slabs. I bought them all and squirreled them away.

I ended up making a desk for myself out of this slab by attaching galvanized gas pipe legs to it. We decided recently though that this slab would be a better coffee table though, so I replaced the gas pipe with slab legs, and here you go:

The past few posts have been about the process of renovating the Twisted Tree Cafe, which my girlfriend Rachel and I bought last April. The tools and sawdust are cleaned up, and the cafe is open again. To the point:

We worked hard to design a beautiful, comfortable, and flexible space. Overall, the cafe now feels much more open, yet we have added 7 more seats to the layout. While I've been able to do essentially whatever I want, we had very real constraints. Every idea had to fit within our relatively short time frame, and very small budget. (Granted, I was able to absorb my own labor costs, but raw materials and supplies cost real money.)

The tables, chairs and counters are reclaimed heart pine. The window counter stools are made from old barn siding left over from this project. The built in banquette is made from regular lumber yard 2x4's (Because they're cheap, ya know?). A few coats of waterborne grey lacquer from Target Coatings makes those wall studs look way better than they deserve to. The cabinetry around the service counter was built on site from lumber yard plywood and painted with the same grey lacquer. All the chairs, tables and counters are finished with Target Coatings finishes as well. Check out their stuff, they make the very best waterborne finishes I've ever found. And I've looked. A lot.

The menu chalkboards are plywood painted with chalkboard paint, which works so much better than you'd think. (I love how chalkboard menus look; I gained a new appreciation for how long it takes to draw all of those letters!) We sanded the old worn finish off the floors and left them raw.

Finally, I usually hate before and after photos, mostly because they tend to be unfair. The before shot is often a terrible snapshot, while the after shot is professionally styled, lit and photographed. Here is a before shot with about the same perspective and lighting as the first photo in this post.

Much of my design process is a quiet, solitary activity. I do a lot of thinking and sketching to flesh out an idea. If I like how it's shaping up I'll make a presentation sketch to show my client or another designer if I'm collaborating. Those sketches get discussed and red-lined. Sometimes there will be a series of sketches and then a final "proper" drawing. Sometimes I just do my shop layout from a sketch. Here are a couple pages from my sketchbook for the Twisted Tree Cafe project:

I think there's a lot of romance associated with making something like a chair from something like a pile of lumber. But I find it is more process than romance. In the simplest terms, you get a tree, cut it into pieces, dry them out, cut them into smaller pieces, cut them into smaller pieces yet, cut a bunch of joinery or shapes (or both) into those pieces, then assemble them together into something new like a chair or a cabinet or a boat or a house. Most of that lumber from the previous post got cut up into the piles of parts stacked in the photo below.

Here are the tabletops cut, planed and glued back together. There are technical and practical reasons why you go through this, rather than just getting one board as wide as you need. I'll save you the long explanation, but it's part of the process.

Onto the chairs now. It takes a bit of cutting and shaping to get a pile of rectangular lumber into a chair. Here is the aftermath of trimming a chair leg to a pattern. The process is sort of like using a stencil to get the letters on your yard sale sign or ransom note to be identical, except you aren't masking off paint, you're cutting off wood. And it throws a pretty amazing amount of wood chips and dust around. Right here it looks a bit romanticized. In the shop it's primarily a mess. A loud, dusty, sometimes hazardous mess. But it's part of the process, and if you're lucky enough to enjoy it, it's a rather nice way to pass time.

After shaping the legs, the back legs still need some more sculpting so that they twist just so into the curve of the backrest. That's what I'm doing here on the bandsaw. (#selfie alert!)

Stacked chair parts. Seat blanks are piled in back, and from left to right are: backrests, front legs, rear legs.

Rachel and I decided to make the new chairs and tabletops for Twisted Tree Cafe from reclaimed Heart Pine. I've used it in the past and besides being a good environmental choice, the stuff is absolutely breathtaking. The dining set pictured on my homepage is made from it. That photo is a good preview of what we're doing in the cafe: we're using the same wood species, and the chair I designed is a simplified variation of the one in the pictured.

On our day off this week we jumped in the truck and headed to a mill that specializes in reclaimed lumber from old buildings. They've got an amazing amount of space just crammed with stacks and stacks of old beams. I love workspaces of all kinds, and I can't help romanticizing them, so here's a little black and white photography:

...and the couple who owned it wanted to sell it. It happens that my girlfriend Rachel has always wanted to have her own cafe. So last Spring we became the third owners of the 10-year-old Twisted Tree Cafe in Asbury Park NJ.

And that's why I haven't updated the blog for the last 6 months or so.

Now that the Summer vacation crowds have dissipated, I'm back in the shop at least a few days a week. And what does a guy who's used to building everything in his life do when he has a shop and a cafe? Right: cafe makeover.

The first phase of the project is being built from these babies:

Yes, those are 2x4s. No, I'm not framing walls. We just happen to need a lot of banquette on a little budget. Here's one section set up in the shop:

How we figure people will react.

How we hope people won't react.

How we hope people do react.

Check back- we've got a lot planned for our little cafe! And stop in for lunch or a snack if you are ever in the area and say hi! :)

Here's a console table done in White Oak with a cerused (aka: limed oak) finish. The lower shelf and hardware are brushed aluminum. It is actually the final piece of a commission for a beautiful apartment in NYC, so it seems fitting that it will be a place holder here.

This will be the last piece I post here for a little bit. I'll explain why very soon in another post. (The reason falls into the "good news" department, don't worry.)

So. Here it is, the solution you've been waiting for. The Schlep Stool! Actually, three Schlep Stools. Pine, Walnut, Black Milk Paint. They're 24" tall, and make a nice kitchen counter stool or plant stand or end table or something to pile stuff on in the corner. And then you flip your lid and things get crazy...

You probably have the idea from the pictures, but when you need to get to that top shelf in the kitchen cabinet just schlep your Schlep on over and climb right up. While some of us don't see anything wrong with leaving a step ladder leaning up somewhere in the house, civilized people often prefer a more elegant solution.

Special thanks to #djhoudini for naming the Schlep

(I feel like I should make a million of these and get Ron Popeil to sell them.)

The door and drawer pulls for the cabinet that I just finished. They are made from old railroad spikes. I used to walk my dog along the local tracks and find spikes discarded all around. Sometimes I'd fill my pockets.

Here's the final result from all that grid work from this previous post:

The finish is milk paint, which is unlike any modern paint, and really quite beautiful. It has a unique look which works well with antique type finishes (probably because it's the finish that's actually on so many antiques.) Here's a detail:

The cabinets are open on the bottom and simply drop over the subwoofer. Each has a section of lattice that opens to reveal a shelf for some other electronics.

I've made several sets of blocks over the years as gifts for friends with new babies or grandchildren. Blocks are wonderful toys: they foster creativity, hand-eye coordination, and last for generations. Two sides of each block have chalkboard surfaces. There are 32 blocks in a set, housed in a little box with a sliding lid.

I make blocks from cut-offs and scraps from past projects. These are reclaimed southern yellow pine from a dining set. I have 4 sets available. If you are looking for a perfect last minute Holiday gift for a baby or toddler, look no further. Price is $120. Drop me a line or call (732-996-9740) if you're interested.